We are continuing our discussion on the blog post, or repost by Jeff Carr, on the Early Site regarding myths about taxonomies and SharePoint. Today, let’s talk about Myth #4 – SharePoint taxonomies need to be comprehensive and finely grained.
Taxonomies need to fit the applications. Term lists need to be matched to the corpus. That is they need to follow the lingo of the enterprise and the business sector itself. It’s not that size doesn’t matter, it is that the size should match the application. Some people put a million documents in SharePoint. Well then 200 terms is not going to serve the user very well is it. Every search term would yield 5000 hits. But then you are not going to search inside SharePoint with that many documents either. The search will be outside using FAST or Perfect Search or Lucene or something else. If you want to user to get less than 100 hits from a search then you would expect to have about 1000 terms for a million object repository.
If search and the taxonomy are managed outside of SharePoint and linked into SharePoint then the user experience both on the document upload/creation side and the search side will be much better. Crappy taxonomies only make SharePoint findability a bigger problem than it already is.
Marjorie M.K. Hlava
President, Access Innovations
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in taxonomies, metadata, and semantic enrichment to make your content findable.
